Download or read book Three Essays on Education Policies and Child Health written by Lu Yin and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In models in which we control for student-level fixed effects, we find strong evidence that with the increase of teacher evaluation standards students tend to have higher BMI and are more likely to be overweight. The third essay examines the impact of State-Sex-Education policies as well as the new Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, the Title V, Section 510 Abstinence Education Program on adolescent risk behaviors. To account for the potential differential impacts of 1996 Title V Section 510 had upon state sex education mandates which will subsequently bias our analysis, we thus employ an Interrupted Time-Series design that first exploits the impact of 1996 reform on state sex education legislatives and identify their effects on adolescent sexual behaviors subsequently. First, we find that neither abstinence-only nor comprehensive sex education decrease the probability of being sexually active or increase the likelihood of performing safe sex. Instead, we find that abstinence-only lower the probability of using condoms and birth control pills relative to not using any birth control method. Second, using the ITS model, we find that the trend in percentage of students who had sex (percentage of students who had sex before 13) decreases by 0.5% in high-implement states relative to low-implement states post 1996 reform.

Download or read book Three Essays on Social Determinants of Child Health and Education in India written by Ankur Sarin and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Children s Health and Education Policies written by Kathleen Ngar-Gee Wong and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation is comprised of three independent research papers, which broadly focuses on the introduction and outcomes of policies concerning children's health and education. Although the chapters are related in theme, the objective, scope and empirical strategy of each paper differs. The first chapter, "How Did SCHIP Affect the Insurance Coverage of Immigrants Children?" (with Thomas Buchmueller and Anthony Lo Sasso), focuses on the passage of the State Children's Health Insurance Program in the late 1990s, which expanded public insurance eligibility and coverage for children in "working poor families". Despite this success, over 6 million children are eligible for public insurance, but remain uninsured. The study focuses on children born to immigrant parents because of their low rates of insurance coverage and unique enrollment barriers. The results indicate SCHIP was successful in increasing overall insurance take-up and in reducing disparities in access to health insurance coverage. The second chapter, "Looking Beyond Test Score Gains" determines whether the introduction of school accountability programs (prior to the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001) affected individuals' educational attainment and labor market outcomes. The effects are evaluated along two dimensions: differences in the length of program exposure and variation in program quality. The results indicate school accountability had mixed success in increasing outcomes across gender and racial/ethnic groups. They also suggest the heterogeneous treatment effects are consistent with some of the unintended consequences documented in the school accountability literature. The third chapter, "The Role of Education on Health Behaviors, Investments and Outcomes", uses a new combination of instrumental variables to predict individuals' schooling and determine whether there is a causal effect of education on young adults' health behaviors. The instruments rely on changes to state policies, dating back to the 1970s, that dictate when children are permitted to start and stop attending school. The results indicate education not only decreases the likelihood of smoking, heavy drinking and obesity, but affects the frequency of these behaviors and degree of obesity. Education also promotes behaviors that are akin to health investments, such as increasing sunscreen use and the receipt of preventive services.

Download or read book Three Essays in Education Policy written by Thomas Edward Davis and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Child Health and Policy Implications written by A. Chakravarty and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Child Health and Policy Implications written by Abhishek Chakravarty and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on Local and Federal Programs Serving Children with Disabilities written by Cassandra Michele Benson and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2017, 6.7 million children received special education services and 1.2 million children received Supplemental Security Income. Despite the reach of these two programs, little research has examined how local, state, and federal policies interact with these two program. This dissertation is comprised of three essays examining local and federal policies affecting children with disabilities. In Chapter 1, I use administrative student level records from the state of North Carolina and regression discontinuity methods, to corroborate earlier research suggesting that the youngest children in the classroom are more likely to receive special education services relative to their older peers. Children born the month before the school cutoff date are 1.75 percentage points (16%) more likely to receive special education in grade 3 relative to their peers born the month after the cutoff date. Importantly, I find that the gap in special education placement does not diminish with school tenure. In grade 12, children born the month before the cutoff date are still 3.84 percentage points (42%) more likely to receive special education services relative to their peers born the month after the cutoff date. Thus, I find evidence of a negative feedback loop in which the youngest children are placed on a lower track at the onset of their schooling, from which they generally do not recover. In Chapter 2, I document a direct pathway from receipt of special education to SSI using a two-sample fuzzy regression discontinuity design. First, using administrative records from North Carolina, I corroborate earlier findings that children born the month before the kindergarten entry eligibility cutoff date are more likely to receive special education services relative to children born the month after the school cutoff date. Next, using National Health Interview Survey respondents linked to Social Security Administration records, I document that the children born just before the cutoff date are 0.78 percentage points (or 30%) more likely to apply for and 0.55 percentage points (or 59%) more likely to receive an award for SSI between the ages of 5 and 12 relative to children born just after the school cutoff date. I find no increase in awards among groups unlikely to be affected by the relationship between school starting age and special education; these include children with physical impairments or those too young for school enrollment. Two-sample fuzzy RD estimates indicate that a 1 percentage point increase in the fraction of children receiving special education services induces a 0.16 percentage point (or 10%) increase in the fraction of children with an SSI award. Back of the envelope calculations suggest that approximately 18% of the growth in the SSI caseload can be attributed to rising rates of special education and spillovers between these two programs. In Chapter 3, I test how exposure to the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) affects the likelihood a child receives SSI payments between the ages of 15 and 18. Exogenous variation in exposure to the EITC is derived from the maximum credit available to the child in his state of residence each year between the ages of 0 and 18. Reduced-form estimates indicated that exposure to an additional $1,000 each year reduces the.

Download or read book Three Essays on the Deteminants of Child Health written by Aparna Lhila and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on Education Law and Policy written by Regina R. Umpstead and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Resources in Education written by and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 748 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on the Economics of Education and Early Childhood written by Francisco Haimovich Paz and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In these essays, I study the long-term effects of education policies and birth order on educational and labor market outcomes. In my first chapter I study the long-term effects of one of the first early education programs in the US - the Kindergarten Movement (1890-1910). I collected unique data on the opening of public kindergartens across cities in the US during this period. I then link over 100,000 children living in these cities to subsequent Censuses where their adult outcomes can be observed. I find that kindergarten attendance had large effects on adult outcomes. On average, the affected cohorts had about 0.6 additional years of schooling and six percent more income (as measured by occupational score). These effects were substantially larger for second generation immigrant children. The effects of this early intervention are most likely due to language acquisition and the attainment of various "soft skills" early in childhood. The second chapter was co-authored with Maria Laura Alzua and Leonardo Gasparini, who directed the project. In this chapter, we study the long-term effects of an educational reform in Argentina. In the nineties Argentina implemented a large education reform that mainly implied the extension of compulsory education in two additional years. The timing in the implementation substantially varied across provinces, providing a source of identification of the causal effects of the reform. The estimations from difference-in-difference models suggest that the reform had a positive impact on years of education and the probability of high school graduation. The impact on labor market outcomes was positive for the non-poor youths, but almost null for the poor. In my third chapter I use US historical data to empirically test whether long-term birth order effects differ across the leading and lagging regions of the country in the Pre-War World II period. To do so, I create a large panel dataset by linking more than two million children across the 1920 and the 1940 full census counts, and to the World War II army enlistment records. I then study birth order effects on various long-term outcomes (with emphasis on educational outcomes). I find that in general, birth order effects are positive in the "developing" south--i.e. younger siblings do better than older siblings-- and negative in the relatively modern north, which is consistent with the available evidence from contemporary data for developed and developing countries. I then exploit state level variation to show that birth order effects are positively correlated with the share of rural population, child labor rates and negatively correlated with the level mechanization in agriculture. I also show that, regardless the state of birth, the effects tend to be larger for the poor. Finally, I complement the analysis by looking at birth order effects on earnings and adult height. While I find relatively similar results for earnings, I find no birth order effects on adult height, which suggests that we can rule out improvements in health or nutrition as the potential mechanisms behind the effects on education and labor outcomes.

Download or read book Three Essays on the Impact of Welfare Policies written by Megan Deepti Philomena Thomas and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation studies the impact of welfare policies in India and the United States with an emphasis on the indirect effects on children’s well being. Welfare policies, especially policies that target poverty alleviation, have been shown to increase employment and family income. I explore their potential to have secondary effects on children’s health and education and to have long run effects. I analyze three large public welfare policies, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) in India, the WWII GI Bill in the United States and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) in the United States. The first chapter studies NREGA in India, the world’s largest public works program, which has increased employment and wages in rural India. Using a regression discontinuity with difference-in-difference empirical strategy based on a unique method used by the government to roll out the program in three phases, I find that the program significantly increased child health investments, reduced child mortality and increased children’s ability to complete math and reading exercises. The second chapter studies the WWII GI Bill in the United States, which provided generous education financial support to veterans and is popular for having increased college education. Using a regression discontinuity design based on the sharp fall in eligibility across birth cohorts due to the enlistment method, I find that the WWII GI Bill also caused a significant increase in high school completion and in the long run an increase in employment and a decrease in poverty. The third chapter studies the EITC in the United States, which is a tax credit scheme that supplements earned income and has increased employment particularly for single mothers with high school level of education or below. Using the differential increase in 1993 in the tax credit generosity across families with one child and families with two or more children, I find that the program increased child health insurance coverage, especially through private health insurance. The analyses of the three programs demonstrate that welfare policies can indirectly benefit children’s development and have positive effects in the long run, which should be included in their evaluation.

Download or read book Three Essays in Search of a Conversation written by Sherman Lewis and published by Hayward Area Planning Association. This book was released on 2022-08-27 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These essays are for Americans concerned about the future of our country and for policy wonks. By and large, the political process is controlled by those who take an intertest in politics, large in number but small as a percent of population. Are you a member of the political class? Membership is voluntary. Our first 800 years of thinking: science culture and empathy from the Enlightenment ~1600 to ~ 2400 The Crisis of the Anthropocene: The most comprehensive description of all issues of the crisis in less than 100 pages. For the purpose of going through your mind to influence your brain. Musings on our Present Discontent: America, not advanced, not a democracy. Right to life for baby; right to choose for mom. Taxation. The security of a free state. Issues not discussed. The threat from within, Trumpism. The threat from without: Putinism. How to participate. Renewal.

Download or read book Three Essays in Health Economics written by Anna Choi and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation contains three essays in the field of health economics and health policy. The first essay studies the effects of legalizing medical use of marijuana on marijuana use and other risky health behaviors. I examine the restricted-use data from the National Survey of Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), which is a repeated cross sectional data set with state identifiers from 2004 to 2012. During this period, 9 states and Washington D.C. allowed patients with medical conditions to use marijuana. I estimate difference-in-differences (DID) models to examine the impacts of these policy changes on risky health behaviors. Allowing medical use of marijuana does not lead to higher marijuana use among the overall population and the youth. However, I find that medical marijuana laws (MMLs) are positively and significantly associated with marijuana use among males and heavy pain reliever users. The second essay is a joint work with John Cawley and tests a novel hypothesis: that these health disparities across education are to some extent due to differences in reporting error across education. We use data from the pooled National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) Continuous for 1999-2012, which include both self-reports and objective verification for an extensive set of health behaviors and conditions, including smoking, obesity, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and diabetes. We find that better educated individuals report their health behaviors more accurately. This is true for a wide range of behaviors and conditions, even socially stigmatized ones like smoking and obesity. We show that the differential reporting error across education leads to underestimates of the true health disparities across education that average 19.3%. The third essay is a joint work with Rachel Dunifon and studies how state regulations related to the quality of child care centers-such as teachers' education and degree requirements, staff to child ratios, maximum group size, and unannounced inspection compliance requirement-are predictive of children's health, developmental and cognitive outcomes. State level policies that are related to improving the productivity of child care center teachers by having a higher staff to child ratios and advanced schooling requirement are predictive of child's weight related outcomes and cognitive outcomes.

Download or read book Three Essays on Child Education written by Gokce Kale and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on the Economics of Health written by Yleana Pamela Ortiz Arevalo and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on the Role of Public Policy in Shaping Parental Behavior in a Child s Early Life written by Sarah Marie Martin-Anderson and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation is comprised of three article-length essays, all of which concern important issues in early-life health and well-being. All three essays focus on the decision to formula feed or breastfeed--one of the first decisions a mother makes in her child's life. Two of the papers--one quantitative and one qualitative--study the environment of the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit and the potential effect of hospital policy and procedures on breast milk feeding. The remaining paper investigates a large federal policy and the consequences of altering the costs of infant formula relative to breast milk. All papers are tied together by an eye towards the plasticity of these early life experiences, as well as the troubling persistence of health disparities by race, class and maternal education. Essay One: Breast milk feeding in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) is associated with a host of improved health outcomes. However, breast milk feeding rates differ by socioeconomic status, race, ethnicity and maternal education indicating that these results are vulnerable to selection bias. Qualitative work by this author and others suggests that women giving birth in the late-night hours are less likely to begin a successful milk expression regimen due to the lack of experienced clinicians working during these shifts. Using the hour of birth as an instrument for breast milk feeding, this study attempts to isolate the effects of breast milk feeding on incidence of deadly conditions in the NICU, as well as the infant's growth patterns and length of stay. This study also uses innovative measures of the indications for delivery type in order to construct a sub-sample whose distribution of delivery times is the most random, thereby increasing the validity of the analysis. The first-stage of the analysis revealed no significant relationship between late-night births and breast milk feeding at discharge, contrary to the claims of clinicians and mothers interviewed in a separate study. C-Section delivery and shorter maternal lengths of stay significantly predictive of decreased breast milk feeding at discharge, even after controlling for potential confounders. The reduced-form analysis suggests that infants born in the evening (5pm-Midnight) are roughly 2-4% more likely to contract Necrotizing Enterocolitis at some point during their stay in the NICU. The majority of associations between hour of birth and other health outcomes were insignificant. Evidence of heterogeneity in hour of birth effect size by birth weight, gestational age, race/ethnicity and maternal age were also explored. Essay Two: It is impossible in most countries to randomize assignment into child health programs that may offer benefits. In the absence of this gold standard of program evaluation, researchers face the threat of selection bias--the possibility that there are unmeasured differences, relevant to outcomes, between those who are treated and those to whom they are compared. A common concern is that people who are eligible for a program but choose not to enroll may differ from those who do enroll. Because policies geared towards a country's most vulnerable people are determinants of health inequities, it is imperative that sources of selection bias be identified and that evaluation methods minimize the impact of selection bias on our estimations of treatment effects. Using a case study of a large Federal nutrition program in the United States, this study reviews how researchers have attempted to minimize selection bias and presents an analysis illustrating how the decision to take up the program can highlight sources of this bias. Relying on data from a longitudinal study of mothers and infants, I show that prenatal attitudes and beliefs may determine postnatal program enrollment, and that the direction of the bias differs by demographic variables. Further, I show that magnitude of supposed program effects vary significantly as a function of these prenatal beliefs. In sum, this paper makes the case for more careful study of the factors that determine take-up of a program, and inclusion of those factors in an evaluation of the program Essay Three: The third paper in this series diverges from the methodology of the first two essays. This paper is the culmination of a year-long survey data collection effort; the work is a collaboration between UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco and Alta Bates Summit Medical Center (Berkeley, CA). The objective of this study was to investigate determinants of breast milk feeding in the NICU, and to try and account for the pervasive racial, ethnic, socioeconomic and language disparities in breast milk outcomes. The survey was developed by the authors of this essay based on established theories of decision making about infant feeding. Over the course of the study period, mothers giving birth at less than 32 weeks gestational age were invited to participate in the study, either through filling out a survey in the hospital, participating in a one-on-one interview, or both. This essay focuses on the results from the survey which were later linked to medical outcome data of the infant upon discharge home. An innovation of this study is the collection of breast milk exclusivity--that is, if a dose-response relationship between breast milk and outcomes did exist, our data collection method would be able to capture it. Results indicate that mothers who participated in the study were less likely to breast milk feed if they were: of black race, non-Hispanic (any race), low-income, or living a long distance from the NICU. Measures of social support, peer effects, and attitudes towards breast milk feeding also predicted the proportion of an infant's feeding that was breast milk.. Implications of these findings are discussed, as are the lessons learned from pursuing this type of study.